Giving while living: Utah couple's kidney donation story

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Dennis Treadway faced a lengthy wait for his third kidney transplant.
His wife Jesica Treadway donated her kidney through a paired exchange to aid him.
Living donations improve outcomes amid a critical organ shortage, experts say.

WEST VALLEY CITY — Dennis Treadway has been battling kidney failure since his 20s.

"Not feeling well, not a lot of energy," he said.

Over the years, Treadway has relied on transplants to survive. In 2024, he was once again waiting for a kidney transplant, for the third time, and facing a potentially yearslong wait.

"They don't last forever," he said. "You wish they would, but they don't."

That's when his wife, Jesica Treadway, decided to step in.

"I knew that I had to do something," she said.

Jesica Treadway began the process of becoming a living kidney donor. During testing, doctors found she was a match — but believed there might be an even better one for her husband through a paired kidney exchange.

"They said, 'You match, but we believe we can find a better match for him than you matching to him. Would you be open to donating your kidney to someone else?' And I said, 'Yeah, absolutely,'" Treadway said.

Through that exchange, Jesica Treadway donated her kidney to a recipient on the East Coast, helping move her husband higher on the transplant list.

"She's a hero on both sides," Dennis Treadway said.

Just a few months later, Dennis Treadway received a kidney from another donor.

Doctors said living donation can lead to better outcomes and help address a critical shortage. More than 100,000 people in the U.S. are currently waiting for an organ transplant, and 90,000 of those are waiting for a kidney. Between 11 and 13 people die every day in the U.S. waiting for a kidney transplant.

"There's a huge need," said Dr. Donald Morris, medical director for the kidney-pancreas transplant program at Intermountain Health. "If someone is approved to be a living donor, it's very safe. It's going to double that (recipient's) life expectancy, so it's a very meaningful gift."

For Jesica Treadway, the decision was simple.

"It's worth going through this because you're helping someone else," she said.

Today, Dennis Treadway said he's feeling better than ever.

"I can come home and do more. I catch up with yard work, I catch up with kids," he said. "She's not only helping me, but she's helping someone that could have been worse off; (for) that I was really proud of her."

Living organ donors are typically healthy adults who undergo a comprehensive medical and psychological evaluation before being approved to donate. Medical teams determine eligibility on a case-by-case basis to ensure safety for both the donor and recipient.

Learn more about living organ donation here.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.